Ancient Rome is a wonder to me, because of how its economy got so advanced that it started to resemble modernity to a T. Were there any writers who noticed the phenomenal progress and extrapolated into the future, the way we’ve done in the much more recent past? Or did they not appreciate the changes happening around them? What about other great civilizations, like Egypt?
Can you be more specific as to what you mean? That’s a very vague question. In fact, it’s not so much a question as a vaguely questioning statement.
Assuming you’re asking what I think you’re asking (I imagine you’re asking about Roman view of the future) this is a hard question to answer, because so much of ancient views of the future are steeped in mysticism.
Ancient Rome for example, used the Sibyls to gain prophecies of the future (prophecy and oracles being probably the closest thing ancients had to what you’re thinking of).
Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations seems to have a very accepting view of the future as almost a preordained fate;
“Let not things future trouble thee. For if necessity so
require that they come to pass, thou shalt (whensoever that is)
be provided for them with the same reason, by which whatsoever
is now present, is made both tolerable and acceptable unto thee.”
He also is quoted saying “Confine yourself to the present,” and "Look back over the past, with its changing empires that rose and fell, and you can foresee the future, too. "
The Romans were a very pragmatic people, overall. speculating on the state of the world in the distant future would likely have been seen as a pointless distraction from more proper, Roman pursuits.
Missed the edit window; more accurately, the second quote of Marcus Aurelius is;
XXVII. To look back upon things of former ages, as upon the manifold
changes and conversions of several monarchies and commonwealths.
We may also foresee things future, for they shall all be of
the same kind; neither is it possible that they should leave
the tune, or break the concert that is now begun, as it were,
by these things that are now done and brought to pass in the world.
It comes all to one therefore, whether a man be a spectator
of the things of this life but forty years, or whether he see
them ten thousand years together: for what shall he see more?
‘And as for those parts that came from the earth, they shall
return unto the earth again; and those that came from heaven,
they also shall return unto those heavenly places.’
Whether it be a mere dissolution and unbinding of the manifold
intricacies and entanglements of the confused atoms;
or some such dispersion of the simple and incorruptible
elements . . . ‘With meats and drinks and divers charms,
they seek to divert the channel, that they might not die.
Yet must we needs endure that blast of wind that cometh from above,
though we toil and labour never so much.’
Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I think I may have used the wrong term. A futurist is a person who sits around predicting what the world will be like decades or centuries from now. Futurism seems be an art movement.
So, my question is whether ancient civilizations had any Futurists, who perhaps saw the progress that had been made in overcoming barbarism and predicted that things would continue to improve/change. Predictions might range from merely increasing populations and a greater number of large cities, to saying that government will evolve, to even postulating technological improvement or ever-growing prosperity. But possibly they never thought about such things?
That’s one view. Interesting. Didn’t he realize that the world, and especially the Italian peninsula, of 160 AD was vastly different from 840 BC? Yet he claims it will be unchanged ten millennia hence. Perhaps it is all the mythology they believed that told them of vast great civilizations which were supposed to have always existed.
One that started in Italy, actually.
He believed that everything that did happen was fated, and everything that will happen is fated, and the changes that have happened and will happen are all of the same sort…governments rise, governments fall, republics turn into monarchies, monarchies into republics, but nothing fundamentally changes. People in 840 BC were the same as people in AD 160, only the names and the lines on the map change.
Captain Amazing has it in one - his prediction for the future is that their will always be great powers, different forms of government, even if the specifics are different the overall way the world works would be fundamentally unchanged. - “We may also foresee things future, for they shall all be of
the same kind.”
In retrospect he was pretty much bang on.
Although only the view of one Emperor, Marcus Aurelius was considered one of the foremost philosophers at the time, as well as being the last of the “Five Good Emperors,” so his views would have likely been highly influential.
Rome had seen the collapse of many great Empires (Persian, Macedonian, Seleucia, Ptolemaic and many more - often at the hand of Rome) - so it seemed sensible that this pattern in human history would repeat itself endlessly.
Isn’t the shift from a circular view of history to a linear one typically associated with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution? (At least in western societies.)
Nit-Pick: Rome’s Sibylline Books were not used to predict the future. The famous Sibylline Books were only used on select occasions, by particular individuals, and only then as a guidebook (basically) on how to appease the gods (for inflicting some ill upon Rome). Essentially they were used subsequent a calamity, not to predict an impending disaster.
Nitpick on your nitpick; Sibylline Books != a Sibyl; a Sibyl (such as the Libyan Sibyl) were prophetic priestesses in (kinda) the same sort of manner as the Greek Oracles - in fact there was a Delphic Sibyl - although to make matters more confusing she was separate from the Delphic Oracle. Heraclitus speaks of them thus; "The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.’
The books were purchased from a Sibyl (Virgil says it’s the Cumaean Sibyl) by Tarquinius Superbus, which were then kept and consulted at the Senate’s request to ward off disaster.
To make matters even more confusing the Sibylline Books are also seperate from the Sibylline oracles, supposedly consisting of transcribed words of the Sibyls.
I have a vague memory of one of my high school history teachers telling me that a Chinese ruler once experimented with a bit of futurism, and decided that China had already reached the technological pinnacle, so withdrew all funding from R&D. Can’t back this up, though.
Yes, although mainly in northern Italy–so when I saw the thread title, Did Romans have Futurism?, my initial response was “No, the Milanese did.”
I’d say it goes back to the Renaissance, and is a characteristic of Modern Europe (and its colonial offspring) in the broadest sense of the term “Modern”–from approximately the fifteenth century until the twentieth century. In fact, many academics today would regard the idea of a linear history–e.g., progressively more advanced civilizations superseding the supposedly barbaric lifestyles of past ages–as an outdated modernist metanarrative, the kind of thinking that we post-moderns have abandoned.
While it’s debatable if we really are post-modern or not, in any case it’s problematic to transpose the way that we understand the universe (or even the span of time) onto a different historical culture. Our philosophical and cultural differences with the ancient Romans run far deeper than the (largely superficial) similarities.
The idea of progrss, based upon technological change, is a recent one. It certainly did not exist before AD 1300 or so (it coincided with the invention of the mechanical clock). The Romans were a stagnant society-the idea of a radically different future did not appeal to them at all-which is why they never invented a working steam engine.
Gotta question you on this - are you seriously suggesting Roman society was essentially unchanged throughout the Kingdom, Republic, Principate, Crisis and Dominate?
Back to the OP; Egyptian views are even more alien than Roman (or Greek) views, steeped in even more mysticism (which foxes Google; searches about Egyptian views of the future, predictions and the like turns up ample new age nonsense and 2012 garbage). Regardless, this claims that Egyptian views about the passage of time were not too dissimilar to our own, their dating system being tied into their religion. Religion was so integral to Egyptian society that I find it hard to imagine Egyptian beliefs about the future being all that different from their attitudes about the present; i.e. that the gods will always be there, that the Pharaoh is a incarnation of divinity, etc. The fact that they built their monuments to last also supports this supposition - you wouldn’t build artificial mountains and hidden tombs if you didn’t have firm beliefs about their necessity in the future. Even Alexander’s conquest millennia later didn’t change this much; the Ptolemaic dynasty did their best to fit in with this view (having the peasants believe the rulers were gods was likely too sweet a deal to give up).
Erm, what? How do you justify that assertion?
Yet… the monuments hadn’t existed until they built them. The future was going to be different from the past: there’d be endlessly more stone stuff standing around. No one in Egypt ever got high and thought of that?
Math didn’t exist in Greece until Pythagoras, and a mere 200 years later had advanced to the point of Euclid’s Elements–a work so advanced it would be the standard for the next one or two thousand years. Did none of the philosophers at the time think, “Holy crap. In the future mathematics will become so powerful it will solve all our problems”? (Or that philosophy will explain everything in the world, etc.?)
Greek society and forms of government advanced just as rapidly. When Plato wrote the Republic, did he have some idea or hope that that was what the future was going to be like?
If the answer to all of the previous questions is no, then I’d like to figure out why. What was it that kept the ancients from extrapolating their progress, in taking an entirely circular, nihilist view of history despite reality pointing to the contrary. Did they have a poor awareness of history? Did they believe too fervently in things like Atlantis (ie, past civilizations supposedly more advanced than they)? Were they so impressed by everything that’d been accomplished that they didn’t think it could get much better? (Like, apparently, that one Chinese emperor.)
You’re in 100 AD Rome. You live in an apartment in a city of one million. You go to downstairs to buy some breakfast as you head to work. After work you go to the [super?]market where produce has been trucked in over paved roads. Perhaps this wouldn’t apply to mere workers, but you might also hit the gym and go for a swim in a heated pool.
I guess some people might be unimpressed by that, but as an admirer of the fine-grained aspects of economics, I find it all to be marvelously advanced organization. And Romans made a point of spreading all this.
The Romans, of course, knew that new buildings got built, people were born and died, forests got cut down and planted, and that change happened. But the Romans were fatalists and determinists. They believed that whatever happened, happen, and what was going to happen was going to happen. So asking the question “What’s the world going to be like 100 years from now”, would be considered, at best, frivolous and pointless, and at worst, sacrilege. The Roman would say to you, “There’s no way to know what the future will bring. We just have to endure it.”